Content vs. process: what do you know, what might you conclude?

One of the recurring questions seems how much should we be emphasizing content versus process. It seems to me that the more we focus on content, the more immediately useful the university experience will be to our student. They will leave with their heads full of useful knowledge that will make them valuable to any employer. They will know what the law says about X or what is the formula for calculating Y. And for this they may expect to be rewarded with higher salaries.

It is also easier to measure. We can set exams for which there are easily identifiable right and wrong answers and there may come a time when we might even agree on what those important sets of facts are that we require students to memorize.

If on the other hand, we focus on processes and activities (for example, identification of relevant facts, logical reasoning, articulation of an argument, choice of relevant theory, and using theory to make predictions) we may make it harder for students in the short term. It may be more difficult for them to impress a potential employer without having a vast array of facts and figures at their fingertips.

However, I do believe that process skills are ultimately more fundamental and more important aspects of what we should be facilitating and nurturing in our students. Facts, even theories, like diets, come and go. What the law says about something today may be overturned tomorrow. Being able to see further, for example reasoning that such a change might suggest a changing trend in public thinking, what might this mean for other tings the company does, are at least as important. The ability to apply one, to abstract away from messy confusing detail into the parsimony of a theoretical generalization, is a skill students will value for a lifetime.

It’s not a question of either or, but rather about not loosing sight of the fact that we need a balance. As we move to increasing the amount of measurement and assessment we do, we need to keep this in mind, because measuring content is generally easier that measuring thinking and reasoning, and as Peter Blau noted, ‘what gets measured tends to get done’.